1938 photograph from Adirondack Experience
She rushed from her campsite at Marcy Dam to Lake Colden after being summoned in the deep of a September night. A man splitting wood for his party’s campfire had sliced his ankle to the bone with an ax. And so Dr. Orra A. Phelps found her way the four miles alone, by flashlight, through the Adirondack wilderness, crisscrossing Marcy Brook, scrambling the steep grade above Marcy Dam and through Avalanche Pass, over slick boulders and along swaying wooden bridges until she reached the Opalescent lean-to. There, she cleaned the hiker’s wound, stitched it, and after some warm coffee, was on her way back to camp.
That backwoods house call happened almost 90 years ago, and it’s detailed in the first chapter of Doc: Orra A. Phelps, M.D.: Adirondack Naturalist and Mountaineer, written in 2000 by Orra’s niece Mary Arakelian.
Intrigued, I recently pulled the brick-of-a-book from Adirondack Life’s library. The cover’s grainy photograph shows Orra in boots and cuffed jeans, smiling knowingly as she sits on the porch of the Woodhull Mountain fire observer’s hut.
I devoured the book. I’d heard of Orra Phelps—she’s on the list of iconic Adirondack women of history, along with Pauline Brandreth, Inez Milholland, Grace Hudowalski and Anne LaBastille. Phelps was known as a superstar botanist and outdoorswoman. It’s easy to simplify achievements. But people—especially Adirondackers—are as multi-dimensional as our landscape.
Arakelian meticulously put Doc together using hundreds of letters that Phelps exchanged with her friends, colleagues and family—particularly her mother, who also noted her daughter’s comings and goings in a diary.
In her letters, Orra chronicled every feeling and action:
Her indefatigable pursuit to become a doctor, ultimately among the first women to attend Johns Hopkins University’s medical school while juggling several jobs and supporting her family.
The time she walked 350 miles from college in Baltimore to her home in Saratoga County, just a bedroll slung over her shoulder.
The many mountains she climbed, including the Adirondacks’ 46 highest peaks, with more than 30 ascents of Mount Marcy.
Her camping trips, often with her mom—also named Orra and also a celebrated botanist—and, bit by bit, the women’s months-long tramps along what was then the newly created 132-mile Northville-Placid Trail.
Orra’s correspondence with founding 46er George Marshall and conservationist Paul Schaefer.
Her 1937 shortwave broadcast from Mount Marcy’s summit, which Orra reached by bushwhacking the same route as Ebenezer Emmons and his party of distinguished American scientists a century earlier.
The visit and hikes with Cold River hermit Noah John Rondeau, who later wrote Orra letters in a romantic, swoopy hand: “Sweet You was among the Cotton [grass] and Sun Dew Flowers. Your style captured both of my Eyes.”
The feat of writing the Adirondack Mountain Club’s very first Guide to Adirondack Trails, precursor to all modern Adirondack hiking guides.
And there’s so much more.
After reading Doc, I wanted to know Orra Phelps even better, so I visited her family’s farm, in Wilton, just south of the Blue Line. This is where Orra, who died in 1986 at age 91, spent most of her life. Today, thanks to Arakelian, it’s the Orra Phelps Nature Preserve—18 acres of forest, wetlands and trails sandwiched in suburbia.
I walked beneath old-growth trees and heard a broad-winged hawk whistle. This is where it all began, where one of the Adirondacks’ biggest champions fell in love with the natural world and dreamed big, planning adventures in the great, wild expanse to the north.
